Troubled families to get help in £1m Enfield Family Turnaround Project
1:50pm Tuesday 7th February 2012 in Where I Live
Charities have won nearly £1million lottery funding for a project to try to tackle problems in 150 troubled Somali and Turkish families in Enfield.
The Enfield Family Turnaround Project will hire six outreach workers to spend three years identifying deprived families with complex problems and offer them parenting courses, counselling, family bonding classes and practical courses in cooking and money management.
The scheme, which has been given £900,000 by the Big Lottery Fund, will be led by national children’s charity 4Children, who will work with Edmonton-based Enfield Parents & Children and Enfield Council to target families with primary-age children, largely in the east of the borough.
Assistant director of early intervention at the council, Eve Stickler, said the project was “fantastic” and that the council would use the knowledge of teachers and youth workers to help the charities identify families that needed help.
She added: “Our role really is to make sure that things are targeted in the right place and link everything together – and we’re also going to learn from other projects going on around the country which is great.
“4Children and Enfield Parents & Children came to us with two separate bids that we thought dovetailed so well that we thought they would work together.”
The council had to rubber-stamp the bid before it could be approved by the Big Lottery Fund.
Dee Eimer, director of Enfield Parents & Children, said: “I’m so excited about this project as it will enable us as a local organisation, together with the experience of 4 Children and support from Enfield Council, to work alongside struggling families on early intervention programmes to enable them to increase the future success of their children.”
Ms Eimer told the Enfield Independent in November that child poverty was increasing in the borough amid funding cuts and as people lost their jobs.
The project, which is one of 17 projects nationally to gain from a £15.2m fund, is set to start in the next few months.
